sql - What's the best way to dedupe a table?

Question

I've seen a couple of solutions for this, but I'm wondering what the best and most efficient way is to de-dupe a table. You can use code (SQL, etc.) to illustrate your point, but I'm just looking for basic algorithms. I assumed there would already be a question about this on SO, but I wasn't able to find one, so if it already exists just give me a heads up.

(Just to clarify - I'm referring to getting rid of duplicates in a table that has an incremental automatic PK and has some rows that are duplicates in everything but the PK field.)

Answer 1

Using analytic function row_number:

WITH CTE (col1, col2, dupcnt)
AS
(
SELECT col1, col2,
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY col1, col2 ORDER BY col1) AS dupcnt
FROM Youtable
)
DELETE
FROM CTE
WHERE dupcnt > 1
GO